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War on Drugs
The War on Drugs is among the most destructive of the "wars" on a metaphor launched by crusading American politicians. Drug after drug have been prohibited in response to a moral panic that had more to do with racial or ethnic anxiety than harm. In this case the purpose was to justify a vast expansion of the police/secret police apparatus in the name of drug prohibition. There are numerous criticisms of the policy but the deprivation of personal liberty is the most compelling. Astonishingly, the United States - the "Empire of Liberty" - now has a higher percentage of its population in jail than any other country ever has. Seriously. More than North Korea.Prison Brief - Highest to Lowest Rates, King's College, London History While in some cases, the push to criminalize some drugs came from the medical field, the banning of certain substances was in large part the result of racism and xenophobia as well as Temperance sentiment among Protestants in the nascent Progressive movement. Opium Opium was the first target. As more and more Chinese immigrated to the US in the late 19th century, anti-Chinese sentiment increased among the populace. Throughout the latter quarter of the 1800s, a number of taxes and restrictions were placed on opium in order to target the Chinese. Chinese immigrants had set up a number of opium dens in America, especially in California. Some were worried that whites were frequenting the dens and thus becoming corrupted. Federal and state governments dumped more restrictions and taxes into the books until 1909 when the importation of opium was banned altogether. A similar movement to ban opium concurrently found success in Canada. This was followed by international agreements restricting the importation of opium.The Origins of California's 1913 Cannabis Law Cannabis The criminalization of cannabis came in bits and pieces as different strains of the plant came into the country. The first type of marijuana targeted was Indian hemp. This strain of the drug was, obviously, brought to the US by Indian immigrants in the early 1900s. A similar panic about whites being corrupted by the foreign drug occurred and taxes on Indian hemp began to appear during the 1910s as a result. During this time, a second strain was being brought into the US by Mexican immigrants that they called "marijuana." Cannabis became the drug of choice among jazz musicians in the 1920s and '30s and many of the great jazzmen of the time were known potheads. Besides already being associated with immigrants, the drug became associated with racist stereotypes of African-Americans. Jazz was considered to be the Devil's music by priggish Evangelical Christians (it was the rock 'n roll of the '20s and '30s). As well, according to the stereotype of the black brute, blacks were already violent and prone to rape white women, thereby corrupting white racial purity. Since cannabis was believed to drive people to insanity and acts of violence, the only possible consequence of increased cannabis use among blacks must be total collapse of Western civilization! The moral panic hit a fever pitch in the mid-'30s, which was somewhat ironic considering that prohibition of alcohol had been repealed in 1933. Henry J. Anslinger, the commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (then part of the Treasury Department), led the crusade against cannabis. Anslinger's ultimate goal was to ban all drugs once and for all. He denounced cannabis as being incredibly addictive in addition to leading to such things as communism, pacifism, murder, insanity, and death. However, Anslinger failed to provide evidence of a rash of murderous pacifists in the nation. He did do his best to play on racial tensions, though, saying: {{cquote|There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the US, and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing, result from marijuana usage. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others. Anti-cannabis propaganda flooded the media, the most notable piece being Reefer Madness, a flick put together by a church group telling the horror tale of a young man being corrupted by smoking dope a few times.Reefer Madness (Tell Your Children!), free movie!! The film is now notorious for being unintentionally hilarious snark fodder for potheads and sober types alike as well as for spawning a spoof musical version of the same name. Anyway, the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 finally criminalized cannabis at the federal level and only met with some resistance from Big Pharma since it heavily taxed medical marijuana as well. Ironically, cannabis use became more widespread after the passage of the law. As early as 1944, Anslinger's claims about the dangers of cannabis were disputed by New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. LaGuardia commissioned a report on cannabis use and the results came back as essentially "mostly harmless."The LaGuardia Committee Report Anslinger and the government in general blew off LaGuardia's report and increased penalties for cannabis possession and ultimately outlawed medical marijuana as well in the post-World War II period. The idea that the use of marijuana leads to the use others is a myth propagated by drug warriors like New York State Senator Michael Ranzenhofer. “Everybody knows that marijuana is the gateway drug for more serious drugs, cocaine, heroin, and we have a very very serious problem of drug abuse and drug addiction within our community and within our state,” he asserted in 2012. See News Article Beyond the obvious logical fallacy of using "everybody knows" as evidence, the problem with his statement is that what connects marijuana with other drugs is their illegality. In effect, Ranzenhofer and fellow drug warriors insist on imposing a conenction that would otherwise not exist. Cocaine As an extract of the coca leaf, cocaine has been available for millennia. However, it did not come into wider use in the Western world until it was artificially synthesized starting in the 1850s. Sigmund Freud helped popularize the drug, prescribing it for depression and impotence. Freud himself was known as a massive crackhead. Cocaine came into wider use as a pain-killer and miracle drug in the late 19th century. In 1886, the Coca Cola company launched its world-famous soft drink with cocaine as an ingredient (hence the name, of course). It soon became the best-selling soft drink of all time. (Gee, wonder why?) Rising incidence of addiction, severe nasal damage, and other adverse health effects created social pressure to restrict the usage of cocaine. In 1903, the drug was removed from Coca Cola. However, it was still perfectly acceptable to snort a line of cocaine for a headache or upset stomach up until 1920, when the US banned the drug.History of cocaine leading up to prohibition Heroin Heroin was first synthesized in 1874 by a British researcher as a non-addictive substitute for morphine. The drug was later patented by Bayer and went on sale in the 1890s. Heroin was initially marketed as a pain-killer, but soon became a cure-all for "whatever ails ya." It was a world-wide hit with doctors — (supposedly) non-addictive, safe, and cheaper than morphine. However, scientists of the day didn't realize that heroin metabolized back into morphine in the blood stream. Whoops. Addiction became widespread as people started using heroin like you'd pop an aspirin today. In 1924, the US Congress outlawed heroin and in 1925, the League of Nations' Health Committee banned it as well.Heroin: The History of a "Miracle Drug" Continuing Absurdity Various mandatory sentencing laws and other penalties were put in place and repealed a number of times until Tricky Dick Nixon officially declared a "War on Drugs." Nixon's motivations are still debated."Nixon’s War on Drugs Decision" Ronald Reagan and Conspiracism Criticism The "War on Drugs" has been criticized by libertarians and liberals as a violation of civil liberties, not the least because the war implies ridiculously high penalties for increasingly petty drug offenses.The Economist - Too many laws, too many prisoners They make the argument that if an individual is taking drugs in the privacy of her or his own home, it is his/her own choice and denying them the right to consume drugs is a basic violation of human rights. (They do not, however, appear to consider too closely the case where someone gets a little too high and goes crazy and terrifies his/her family. Or they have considered it and have decided that, since going crazy and terrifying your family are not inevitable consequences of drug use, banning drugs on those grounds is like banning cake because someone could eat to much, and then sit on their family, crushing them to death.) Moreover the so-called "war on drugs" has resulted in widespread problem of untreated or under-treated pain."Drug Cops and Doctors: Is the DEA Hampering the Treatment of Chronic Pain? - Conference". Cato Institute, September 9, 2005. http://www.cato.org/event.php?eventid=2364 Problems include the injustice of targeting some intoxicants and not others, with critics of the War on Drugs like to deride it using the deservedly snarky moniker "The War on (some) Drugs", and using drug prohibition to enforce other social norms, as when a heavily armed SWAT raid on an organic farm in Arlington, Texas was used by local authorities to punish local code violations. Another problem is that incarceration is always risky. Cases of persons dying in custody because of minor drug offenses are tragically common. Finally there is the opportunity for physical abuse by sadistic police. See for example the cases of a man annally probed 8 times following a traffic stop and a woman stripped searched, cavity searched and subjected to observed bowel movement, CT scan and other medical exams without warrant. Then there is the very dangerous combination of ambition and mendacity of some police officers. Consider the killing of Eugene Mallory, an 80-year-old retured engineer in Littlerock, California who was shot to death inside his own home by police executing a no-knock warrant to find a meth lab. Detective Patrick Hobbs, a self-described narcotics expert, apparently spent four days creeping about the property; his surveillance led the warrant’s execution. Detectuive Hobbs later claimed that he, “smelled the strong odor of chemicals” downwind from Mallory’s property. See also * moral panic * Its Not A War On Drugs, Its A War On Freedom * To Win the Drug War: Follow the States Richard Branson * Steven Fleece * Kelly Helleson * Ross William Ulbricht * weed pass * conspiracism * Gabriel Nahas * Lace External links * Oxymoronic Satiric Video Footnotes This page was seeded from Rational wiki.